The First Tesla Model S in Iran and Central Asia

Charging in Kashan, Iran

Hotel offers – two extremes

We put a post on Instagram asking for help to charge our car with three-phase electricity between Tehran and Isfahan. That evening (Wednesday, 31st of May) we received 2 calls from hotels in Kashan.

The person on the first call wanted to sell us a room for 7.000.000 Rial (IRR). That is about 190€. The standard of Iranian hotels is in average quite low and so far, I didn’t see any hotel that was worth 190€/night. Somehow some people in the Iranian tourism industry didn’t understand yet, that tourists are neither dumb nor do they like to be fooled with. We experienced it several times, that we are asked a lot more (meaning up to 5 times more) to pay because we are foreign tourists. An other example are entrance fees of monuments. They always cost 200.000 IRR (5,50€) for non-persian speakers and 30.000 IRR (0,80€) for Iranians. I think this price discrimination is not only disproportional, but is also harming the Iranian tourism industry in the long term.

The second call we received this evening was another hotel manager, who was advertising his hotel and confirming that they have three-phase electricity. After a while Benedikt asked politely how much all of this will cost. He answered that it won’t cost anything for us. The owner of the hotel wants to give us a night for free, since she is a nature lover and appreciates that we are doing our journey with an electric vehicle. That is the other side of Iran. Some people are so generous and hospitable that we sometimes can’t believe that this is happening to us.

Beautiful renovated estate welcoming us for a night

We agreed with the hotel manager that we would arrive the next evening at his hotel. After we left in the afternoon Tehran and its traffic, the Tesla was nicely cruising along the high way towards Kashan. It was still very hot there (above 35 degrees Celsius). Kashan is almost in the Maranjab Desert and looks like a “desert town”. Small, one story high buildings out of loam are typical of Kashan. The hotel manager opened an old, unspectacular door when we pressed the doorbell to one of those loam buildings. Already the first sight into that old house was breath taking. Due to the hot climate, it is not build up in the air but two floors deep. On the ground or deepest story, there is a pictures inner courtyard with a squared pond in the middle. The whole building was renovated with so much care for detail that we almost felt like staying in a museum.

We spend a very calm and relaxing evening in the above-mentioned courtyard and enjoyed that the heat of the day slowly vanished. That evening we also met the lady, who owns the building and invited us. She herself is the architect who renovated the property. One could feel her love for good design and the nature. We were absolutely honored to be her guest.

Charging on a newly installed three-phase outlet

The hotel manager organized in the evening that an electrician would install a three-phase outlet at the fuse box that was right at the entrance door. In the morning, we charged the car from the newly installed plug for about two to three hours. Once more, we left an hotel with a fully charged car.

Post navigation

3 thoughts on “Charging in Kashan, Iran”

I just didn’t get, it.Was the door “unspectacular” or “rusty”?Or is that a typo there?. Kudos to the hotel owner. She did a great job. I hope more tourists fo to the hotel with its newly installed 3-phase outlet for newcomers.